As simple as this question seems, if you ask Google, you will certainly come up with a number of different results.

According to this article on the website of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Yorùbá is spoken by over 20 million people in Nigeria alone. That quote will make sense only when we see that on Ethnologue.com, the go-to place for information about world languages, Yorùbá is said to have just over 19 million speakers.

But how can this be true? The Ethnologue.com website claims that its figures come from a 1993 publication by Johnstone, so maybe that makes sense for 1993. It is highly unlikely for a nation of people – in the absence of war or any other natural disaster/pestilence – to retain the same population figures for twenty-two years! What it means is that the figures quoted by SOAS and Ethnologue are outdated. So, why do we still quote them? And, importantly, what are the real figures? How many speak it in Nigeria as a first language? How many speak it as a second language? And how many speak it in other African countries (Benin, Ghana, Togo etc), and in the diaspora (Brazil, Cuba, United States, Jamaica, etc)?

I sent an email, this morning, to Ethnologue.com to seek clarification on the source of their figures. The response I got this evening from Mr. Chuck Fennig, admits that current figures on this matter are unreliable because of the absence of “accurate assessment”. The World Factbook, he says, “puts the Yorùbá ethnic group at 21% of the total population, which would mean approximately 37 million people, but that would be an Ethnic Population, not a Language Population. It is very difficult to find the percentage of the ethnic group that speaks the language as their mother tongue.  Presumably, that percentage would be 80% or more.” I’ve screenshot his more succinct response below.

Wikipedia gets its own quote from more recent (2007, 2010) publications, and puts the population of the language speakers at 30 million speakers. This is also unsatisfactory. We don’t know where the figure comes from, what its breakdown is by L1 (those who speak it as a first language, a.k.a native speakers) and L2 (everyone else, i.e. non-native speakers, who may be outside the African continent).

The Source of the Problem

The country Nigeria has had a census of its citizens about every ten years from around 1863, and the recorded population trends from there into recent times should normally give us some relevant information. However, figures in Nigerian population census have become politicised and thus not altogether reliable. More importantly, and most sadly, past populations census questionnaires omitted questions about ethnicity (and religion) in deference to politicians in the northern part of the country who have used fear tactics and other bullish manoeuvres to successfully mobilise against this provision, for a number of years. (Read more here).

Hence, all we know about the 1991 census is that the population of the country is 88.9 million. It is from this figure, presumably, that Johnstone (1993) estimates that the Yorùbá language speakers amount to 18.9 million – about 21% of the country’s population (going by Mr. Fennig’s calculation). I haven’t read Johnstone. If anyone has access to the publication, please point me towards it.

The equally controversial (and last) census in the country, which was held in 2006, put the country’s population at 140 million but also refused to account for the number of each ethnic group. If we apply the 21% rule to this, we come up with 29.4 million people, similar to the 30 million figure that we now see everywhere. Again, we don’t know if this is just for the native speakers alone, or if it includes others.

Accounting for endangered languages

For a linguist interested in the study of a language – any language, in a country of over 500 of them – this status quo is one of the most frustrating situations there is. It leads to other equally important and frustrating questions like “How are we sure, now, that the number of languages in Nigeria really/still is 521?” Wikipedia says, also quoting Ethnologue.com, that nine of those languages are already extinct. There is the plausibility that there are more than nine of those languages in the country that have gone extinct. There is also the certainty that, because we don’t know just how many people speak a language, many more languages are already endangered and we may not know it until it is too late. (Read Roger Blench’s sad realisation of this fact in his Research on Minority Languages in Nigeria in 2001). Ethnologue.com, according to the email I received, will not disclose the source of their data.

More work needs to be done, not just by linguists, but by politicians as well. Future census materials, in spite of any threats of sabotage by politicians in any part of the country, should include questions about citizen’s language (and multilingual) capabilities. Religion is certainly less important. But data about language use is not only useful for language research, but also for governmental planning. Funding required to document threatened and endangered languages will come only if we know just what we’re dealing with, and we can’t know that in the absence of reliable data.

According to this source, quoting the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s current population stands at around 170 million people. Back to where we started from, how many of these speak Yorùbá? I have no idea. If I go by the 21%, I’d arrive at 35.7 million people. If we can agree that this is the number of all ethnic Yorùbás in the country, we still need to account for how many are not ethnically Yorùbá but speak the language anyway as a first or second language. And how many of these ethnic Yorùbá identify another language (English, French, German, Hausa, etc) than Yorùbá, as their first language?

Now, let’s substitute “Yorùbá” in this case for any other language in the country, and we’ll see just how terrible the situation is. What is the data? How many people speak these languages as L1 and L2? Is this data reliable? How do we get it? Why can’t we? These are questions that have kept me up at night for a very long time.

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LINKS

1. How Many Are We In Nigeria? (Nigerian Vanguard, September, 2013)

2. Population and Vital Statistics (PDF)

3. Languages of Africa at SOAS: Yorùbá (SOAS)

4. YORÙBÁ: A language of Nigeria (Ethnologue)

5. Yorùbá Language (Wikipedia)

6. Gradually, Nigerian Languages are Dying (Punch, August 2013)

7. Research on Minority Languages in Nigeria in 2013 (PDF) by Roger Blench

8. Nigerian Population (Trading Economies)

9. A screenshot from the email response from Ethnologue.com